Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 5, 1993 TAG: 9310050012
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Brian Kelley
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
For the somnolent suburbs of Fairfax County, where I grew up, there's the smell of cut grass and traffic, too much of the latter.
Charlottesville, on the other hand, reminds me of boxwoods, bourbon and wood smoke.
For Williamsburg and the Peninsula, it's the pungent, salty smell of the marshes and wetlands. I remember bugs hitting my face and the Tidewater funk slapping my nostrils as I barreled along the Colonial Parkway on my motorcycle beside the mile-wide James River, usually at night.
For Richmond, the sickly sweet yet oddly appealing odor of tobacco from the South Side warehouses and manufacturing plants remains stuck in my mind in the same way it hovers over downtown on a humid summer night.
In Woodbridge in Prince William County, the town I just left, there's a sewage treatment plant less than a mile from where I lived. That malodorous memory, on a close, no-wind night, I leave to your imagination.
Now I have a new array of people, places, views and odors to meet, visit, see and smell as a newcomer to the New River Valley and Southwest Virginia.
I'm not exactly a stranger here.
I already know two people - my younger brothers Pat and Joe.
It's been interesting this past month living in the same small town with them, 11 years after I left home for college and newspapering. They've come over for dinner and eaten an entire stacked-enchilada casserole in record time. I've run into them at bars, on the street, at the laundry.
We were born and raised in Northern Virginia, which is a bit of an anomaly, since its usually a place you move to rather than from. For the most part, it's not a place where you grow up and go to school in a neighborhood, then stay to live as an adult.
With a population of 800,000 in Fairfax County and nearly 250,000 in Prince William County and Manassas, it's about as different as you can get from the New River Valley. I learned at last month's economic summit at Radford University that the valley has a population of nearly 153,000, almost half of that in Montgomery County. I also learned the valley is expected to gain 20,000 to 30,000 new residents in the next 17 years.
Which should keep me busy because the county's my beat and I expect to fill future columns by expanding on daily scribblings about the board of supervisors, the school board and so forth. I might also get around to telling the story of how my clunker of a motorcycle came home to die, two weeks after I sold it to a hapless college student.
For now, I'll move the scene to a ridge not too far from the New River Valley but closer to Roanoke.
The mountains, and the chance to work again for a quality outfit, are what brought me here.
At the end of my first week, on one of those stunningly clear evenings the Appalachians are blessed with in spring and fall, Joe and I hiked up a mountain trail in the dark, our small headlamps lighting the way. We reached camp, dropped our packs and walked another few miles, to a locally famous rock outcropping.
I could have stayed up there all night watching the Roanoke Valley twinkle in weak imitation of the starry sky, and the mountains stand as silent, dark barriers to the artificial light. I was thankful for the chance to be atop that ridgeline, standing beside my brother.
Then the cool, sharp wind caused my lips to dry, my eyes to tear up and goosebumps to rise as sweat evaporated.
We tramped the three miles back to camp and slipped silently into our sleeping bags.
I drifted off with a fresh olfactory memory: the smell of a new beginning atop an old mountain.
I haven't slept so well in years.
\ Brian Kelley is a reporter in the Roanoke Times & World-News' New River Valley bureau.
by CNB